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On Thin Places and Thin Persons

Sustained fasting allows prayer to descend to the depth of the heart and burn out the roots of our passions. I stumbled across this quotation by St Paisius Velichkovsky while I was on Athos, recording the new series of our … Read more

The Royal Doors are ready

The iconostasis has a very humble, but functional structure: just the central Royal Doors and one narrow Deacon’s Door to the side. This basic structure is used in most Athonite hermitages, including St Paisios’ Kellia or Elder Joseph the Hesychast’s … Read more

Moments of the Cross

The week of the Cross marks an essential change in Lent. This is the moment when we turn from descriptors of faith to faith itself; when we move from things which are about our faith to things which can only … Read more

Small explosions of life

There is a sense of great freedom in understanding that one does not represent anything and anyone else except oneself. One can easily be crushed by the sense of responsibility that comes from feeling that we stand for anything else … Read more

At home in the desert

I’ll try to write a few lines, just to keep my heart open and my mouth ready to speak. This always happens when I travel for a long time and I meet many people. A need to be quiet, a … Read more

Christmas is coming

Christmas is coming and we are all going home. But what if home is not that towards which we run, but precisely that from which we run away? What if home is not that which is familiar to us, but … Read more